By Ann Fessler
HV875.55 .F465 2006
The author of this probing work, herself an adoptee, interviews several women who, under immense social and family pressure, gave up their newborn children. These cases profiled in The Girls Who Went Away took place between 1945 and 1973. Many speaking out for the first time tell of how as single pregnant women they were treated with contempt in a world of demoralizing double standards and even in some instances shunned by family and friends, cast out from schools, and sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone. These women tell of the grief and shame the have lived with their entire adult lives. The accounts found within these pages set forth a haunting yet illuminating oral history of adoption and the long-term effects on women unfairly judged the “bad girls” of their day.
